National Defence Minister Bill Blair speaks with reporters in the Foyer of the House of Commons on Parliament Hill, in Ottawa on June 17.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
The Canadian government does not believe the time is right to send troops to Ukraine to train soldiers but is not ruling out doing so in the future, the Defence Minister says.
Asked by reporters in Ottawa to elaborate, Bill Blair on Monday cited concerns over the safety of Western soldiers in Ukraine, which has been under a full-scale military assault from Russia since February, 2022.
“At the present time, the circumstances are not right to deploy, in my view, the Canadian trainers in Ukraine,” Mr. Blair said.
“However, should the conditions change, we are open to that.”
The Canadian Armed Forces are currently training Ukrainian troops in Latvia, Poland, Britain and at home, in Canada. Over the years, Canada has trained 40,000 of them, starting in Western Ukraine back in 2015.
However, Canada withdrew its trainers from Ukraine ahead of the 2022 invasion of the country – much of which Russia has the capacity to strike with its missiles and glide bombs.
“We also want to make sure that any members that we deploy into Ukraine would be able to do their job safely,” Mr. Blair said.
“There is, I think, quite an understandable concern about expanding a training mission into Ukraine at the current time.”
European Union countries have been debating whether to train troops on the ground in Ukraine. Mr. Blair just returned from a NATO meeting where the alliance decided it would assume a greater role in co-ordinating arms supplies to Ukraine and training of Kyiv’s troops. It’s an effort to take over from the United States, as NATO-skeptic Donald Trump bids for a second term as the country’s president.
More than 11,100 civilians in Ukraine have been killed since Russia’s all-out assault began in February, 2022, according to a May report by the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. In addition, more than 21,860 civilians have been injured, the office said.
Nearly 6.5 million Ukrainians have fled their country, and nearly 3.7 million have been internally displaced, according to the United Nations. Reconstruction and recovery in the war-torn country is projected to cost US$486-billion over the next decade, a United Nation-backed study published in February says.
With reports from Reuters